High-tech gurus invent ultra slow clock to stimulate long-term thinking.
Our civilisation has shifted into an unnaturally high gear. Nothing gets the unhurried attention it deserves. So a handful of key high-tech thinkers in the San Francisco Bay area decided what we needed to better understand this dilemma is a striking image. They mean that literally. So they’ve created a unique timepiece that ticks only once a year, with a hand that advances only once a century, and which strikes only on the millennium.
The designers include musician Brian Eno, computer expert Daniel Hillis, Whole Earth catalogue and Global Business Network founder Stewart Brand, and former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly, who with support from high-tech companies like Sun Microsystems, PeopleSoft, and Autodesk launched The Long Now Foundation in the hopes of encouraging humanity to adopt a more long-term vision. The group is working on enormous, enduring clocks that turn the concept of “time perception” upside down. The prototype, made of bronze and steel, can be found in a London science museum. They now plan to chisel a Long Now clock into the face of a rock in the Nevada desert.
The foundation was officially set up in “01996”; the extra digit is meant to avoid the threat of Y10K bug in 8,000 years time. This is not just a joke on the part of The Long Now Foundation’s creators, who surprisingly enough work mainly in the computer field, the fastest industry on the planet. A five-figure number marks the dawn of the year 10,000, and that demonstrates an image of the future that most of us don’t exactly have in the forefront of our minds. – MV
For more information: The Long Now Foundation, P.O. Box 29462, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94129-0462, United States; services@longnow.org; www.longnow.org. Via the website you can also order the book The Clock of the Long Now, written by Stewart Brand.
